Kate was out of the house around nine on Saturday morning, which usually only happens if we have a plane to catch, which should tell you the importance Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had for her. She tore through it by dinnertime.
I’m not that big a fan, but I hate missing out on a Cultural Moment, so I picked it up yesterday, and finished it tonight. Kate’s spoiler-free booklog entry has it about right: it’s a Harry Potter book, no less, and no more. She also has a spoiler-laden review post, if you’d like more details.
If you throw a rock into the air, it will land on a blog featuring Harry Potter commentary these days, so I’m not going to attempt to provide deep or detailed analysis. What follows will be long on snark and full of SPOILERS, so those of you still waiting on Amazon and UPS, consider yourselves warned.
Kate has a good phrase in her review, when she says that the book is full of “action substituted for plot.” She only noticed this in retrospect, because she read the book all in a rush, but I stopped several times for one reason or another, and I definitely noticed.
It’s rare for me to say that a long book needed more editing, but this book needed more editing. As I said to Kate at dinner, if I had had to read one more round of “Harry and friends mope about in a tent and snipe at one another, then do something stupid and narrowly escape being killed or captured,” I would’ve done violence to the book. God Almighty, that was tedious.
There’s also no shortage of Idiot Plot in this, as a good chunk of the action is driven by Harry credulously believing whatever nasty thing was said to him most recently. He’s always been kind of a non-entity, personality-wise, but he was really remarkably malleable in the first two-thirds of this book.
And there was far too much time spent establishing the awfulness of life under Voldemort, and the apparent futility of their situation. Yes, we get it, Evil Sucks. Now can we please get on with at least one of the Quests for Plot Tokens that you’ve set up?
Snape turns out to have been good all along, which wasn’t as bad as I feared, but was still pretty lame. Fortunately, it was more or less confined to one long expository chapter, after Snape was already dead, which saved it from becoming completely unbearable.
I liked the bit where Harry decides to sacrifice himself to stop Voldemort, but I was less enthralled with the subsequent chapter, “Harry Potter and the End of The Matrix Reloaded” (think about it: he goes into a bright white space, and has everything explained to him by an old man who isn’t Donald Sutherland). Perhaps some of this might’ve been worked out in the meandering middle third?
The final battles (there were really two) were a bit over the top, but kind of fun. The deus ex machina of wandology was pretty dumb.
The epilogue was unspeakable. Let us not speak of it.
All in all, it wound up about as well as could be expected. I had hoped for better after the fourth book, and feared worse after the fifth, but it was ok.
And there’s my contribution to the Zeitgeist. More physics tomorrow.